It is represented in a hexadecimal format on each device, such as 00:0a:95:9d:67:16.

It is globally unique it means two devices cannot have the same MAC address.

It stands for Media Access Control, and also known as Physical address, hardware address, or BIA (Burned In Address).

It is assigned to the NIC (Network Interface card) of each device that can be connected to the internet. To make communication between two networked devices, we need two addresses: IP address and MAC address.

MAC address is the physical address, which uniquely identifies each device on a given network.

Tomorrow I will try rebooting the hosts just in case the vDS configuration is out of sync. What could I be missing here? I am willing to consider crazy ideas. The 'notify switches' option is turned on both at the portgroup and the uplink. To add to the confusion, and this is just driving me crazy, if I run a 'ping -t ' from the firewall, while a VM is starting up, then the switch will learn the VM's MAC address and the VM will be able to communicate.

However, it can still communicate with other VMs on host1 that are connected to the same portgroup.įurthermore, if there is a VM on host1 that is working fine and can communicate externally, and I vMotion it to host2, then the switch will not learn that the MAC address has moved to a different port (again, even after I issue arping from the VM), and as a result this VM will lose connectivity to the firewall.

When this happens, the VM will not be able to communicate with the firewall, or even with other VMs (that use the same portgroup) on host2. I have observed that occasionally, when creating and starting a new VM on host1, the switch will not learn this VM's MAC address (even if I force a gratuitous ARP using arping).

On another port of the physical switch there is a firewall with one leg in the same VLAN as the portgroup. The uplink of each host is made of two teamed NICs, which are both connected to the same physical switch. There is, for the purposes of the discussion, just one portgroup on that vDS configured to use a VLAN. I have two ESXis with a vDS between them. I have a virtual environment running vSphere 5.1.

Mac address learning